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Haiti protests erupt after disputed polls
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Haiti protests erupt after disputed polls
AFP - Thursday, December 9
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Haiti protests erupt after disputed polls
PORT-AU-PRINCE (AFP) - – Angry protests erupted in Haiti as thousands demonstrated Wednesday after the handpicked protege of President Rene Preval narrowly won a place in the runoff in disputed presidential polls.
Burning tires dotted streets in the capital Port-au-Prince, and the headquarters of Preval's ruling INITE (UNITY) party were set ablaze after Tuesday's late night announcement of the results of the November 28 vote.
The United States reacted immediately through its embassy in Port-au-Prince, voicing concern at the "inconsistent" results, pleading for calm and appealing for the will of the Haitian people to be respected.
But after a tense night, thousands of young people began converging before dawn on the center of the city, ravaged by a January earthquake, many brandishing posters of popular entertainer Michel Martelly.
Martelly was pushed into third place by less than 7,000 votes by the ruling party candidate Jude Celestin who defied pre-election opinion polls and unofficial estimates to finish second.
Former first lady Mirlande Manigat won the largest number of votes, taking 31 percent, and will now face off against Celestin in the run-off on January 16 as neither won more than 50 percent in the first round, officials said.
But Martelly's narrow defeat fueled suspicions of vote-rigging in the Caribbean nation, which has a troubled history of dictatorships and political upheaval.
Just hours after the announcement, Port-au-Prince was a tinderbox. Gunshots echoed through the capital and tire barricades burned through the night.
Then before dawn came the call. "Wake up! Get out of bed!" a young Martelly fan shouted early Wednesday, rousing supporters in the largest slum area of Petion-Ville to take to the streets again.
Clapping and singing, some brandishing sticks and garbage cans, some throwing stones, the protestors paraded through the city, angrily voicing their discontent.
The results announced in a packed Port-au-Prince restaurant credited Manigat with 31 percent of the vote, Celestin with 22 percent and Martelly with 21.84 percent.
"The people came out to vote for Martelly because Manigat and Celestin are not going to sort anything out. Martelly was ahead and they have stolen the elections," one masked youth told AFP.
"We will destroy the country until Martelly is made president," he warned.
Political turmoil only compounds Haiti's misery. Much of the capital still lies in ruins since the January 12 earthquake that killed 250,000 people and left 1.3 million homeless, now living in precarious tent cities.
Ten months after one of the worst natural disaster of modern times, Haiti was hit by the first cholera outbreak here in more than a century. The disease, which erupted in a central river valley, has now spread to the teeming capital and killed more than 2,120 people.
Whoever wins the run-off faces the daunting task of rebuilding a traumatized nation of 10 million that was the poorest in the Americas even before the earthquake.
The US embassy said the first post-quake polls "represent a critical test of whether the Haitian people will determine their destiny through their vote."
But it acknowledged that Celestin's success was "inconsistent with the published results of the National Election Observation Council (CNO)... election-day observations by official US observers... and vote counts observed around the country by numerous domestic and international observers," the US statement added.
The CNO, which is funded by the European Union and had more than 5,500 observers at 1,600 voting centers nationwide, estimated on Monday that Celestin was trailing a clear third behind Martelly.
Jose Miguel Insulza, the head of the Organization of American States (OAS), a regional bloc which also monitored the polls, urged Haitians to follow the rule of law.
"There is always a process for appealing the results, always other channels," he said.
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